Rogers Closes Loophole: No More Free Roaming in Detroit

A problem with wireless mobile near border countries, such as the US and Canada, is some cell towers can be very close to each other’s borders and sometimes the signals can ping in such a way that your Canadian carrier thinks you are in the US and you could get smacked with a large roaming bill. These international ‘crisis’ can play havoc with customer’s billing, and not in a good way. Rogers customers that lived in Windsor were having the same problem but then a ‘perk’ of sorts started several years ago when Rogers Communications implemented a system that would not charge them extra roaming fees if their calls pinged off of a Detroit cell tower – Rogers would just assume that they were still in Canada. Rogers just announced that wireless subscribers in Windsor will no longer be able to take advantage of that ‘perk’ or loophole.

In the past, to prevent any extra roaming fees, Rogers simply exempted all Windsor area codes from roaming charges if they were made within a certain radius of their area code. This allowed many a Windsor customers from traveling across the border into Detroit and make calls back to Canada and never receive any roaming charges. All of that is about to stop now that Rogers has upgraded their system. The new system will still allow roam-free calling while in Windsor, but now they will be charged once they make calls from the US – Detroit will no longer be treated like a Canadian city for the purposes of billing roaming charges. Aaron Lazarus, a Rogers’ spokesman said, “The intention has always been that Canadians not be charged if their phones pinged off a U.S. tower. We’re now able to isolate it more, so it’s really aimed at areas near the water, so you don’t get charged for roaming while still in Canada…The new system is advantageous because it includes voice, data and text, whereas the older notation only applied to voice.” The new system applies to all Canadians and while the system upgrade was implemented in November 2014, it wasn’t until this summer they actually turned it on, so to speak.

In the US, T-Mobile still allows their customers to roam in Windsor and throughout Canada as part of its “Mobile without Borders”. So now when you travel to Mexico or Canada you will be able to make calls as part of your Simple Choice plan, as well as roam on 4G LTE data in those two countries. It’s unlimited so there are no overage fees, no roaming fees, no fees at all to use your phone in Mexico or Canada.